by Carl Schiffman
By early January of 1952 I had a new
after school job, this time for the Composing Room, a print shop on West 46th
Street. The High School of Performing Arts was just next door. I worked picking
up and delivering layouts, proofs, and revised proofs of advertisements composed
by printers working at giant linotype machines and from wooden boxes of hand‑set
type in a bright noisy space on the far side of a counter to which we
messengers would be called to be assigned our trips.
I was generally given three or four good‑sized
manila envelopes to deliver and about as many pick‑ups to make, written out on
separate slips of paper. Deliveries were usually made to a receptionist and
pick‑ups too, would often be waiting for me at her desk. I wouldn't have to say
a word. Other times I would be sent beyond the reception area to contact a
specific individual or department. I took particular pleasure in those
occasions, especially once I had begun to learn my way through the frequently
labyrinthine interior offices.
My job would have been much the same, I
suppose, if I had been delivering proofs for grocery chains or department
stores. Being a messenger just meant finding a sequence of addresses after all,
working out the most efficient or most enjoyable route linking them. But the
Composing Room had interesting clients. I once had to deliver a set of proofs
of book ads to Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. I hadn't read
the second line on the envelope, so instead of delivering the proofs to
whatever office in the museum they were addressed to, I asked for Dr. Mead and
was sent up to her eyrie in one of the stone towers of the Museum.
Dr. Mead was unhappy at the
interruption, she said something nasty to the secretary who had let me in, then
her blue eyes blazed at me. "Can't you read? It says—" And she told
me what street entrance was written on the envelope. "I would
expect," she said, "a messenger to know something about
geography."
I was furious at her tone and at that
little bit of urban anthropology that characterized me—now and forever
presumably—as a messenger. "I might," I snapped back in anger,
"have other interests!" She stared at me in wonder. An anthropoid had
talked back. Her face lit in a brief and wonderful smile.
The prime activity of the Composing Room
was printing advertisements for books. My job was special, different,
important, because of that. Because it brought me, day after day, into the
revered places whose names appeared on the cover and title page of every book I
read. The book connection was instrumental in getting me the job. My friend
Herman, who lived in my apartment house, had been working as a part‑time
messenger at Composing Room since fall. He had gotten the job through his
family's multiple connections with publishing; his step‑father, Albert H.
Gross, was a well-known Yiddish to English translator, who had translated Isaac
Bashevis Singer's first novel, The Family
Moscat, for Knopf. Herman's step‑sister, Nancy, was an editor at Scientific American, which published
book ads.
If I found romance in visiting famous
publishing houses, even if I got no further than the reception desk, it was
because books were privileged objects for me. My family, it must be admitted,
unlike Herman's, paid chiefly lip service to literature. My father may have, as
he claimed, read everything that mattered in European literature before he came
to the United States at age twenty-eight; what I actually saw him reading as I
grew up were Perry Mason and Ellery Queen mysteries, and other detective novels
that came three to a volume from the Mystery Book Club. He also read historical
romances by Dumas, some H.G. Wells, and occasionally, but always with sovereign
contempt, American best‑sellers.
My mother's reading habits were a
mystery to me. I recall well-worn volumes of Keats or Shelley on her bedside
table. My aunt Norma, who had her own bedroom and bath in our apartment, had built-in
bookcases filled with publications by or about Marx and Lenin, primers on
dialectical materialism, the collected works of Jack London, but never to my
knowledge read anything more demanding than the Daily Worker or some propaganda booklet telling her what Party line
to toe; perhaps she read a few novels by the left-wing author, Howard Fast.
Out of this inauspicious brew, perhaps
more out of what my family talked about over dinner than what it actually read,
my own delight in reading emerged. What was most remarkable was the intensity I
was able to bring to whatever I read. I read Modern Library Giants, long long
books like the Studs Lonigan trilogy or Of
Human Bondage, in a single day. I think my impulse was purely escapist. I
had a science fiction collection of hundreds of magazines that included a
complete run of Astounding back to
1940 or 41, and many copies before that; I owned every issue of Galaxy and many copies of the large
format pulps with the lurid front covers, Fantastic
Adventures and Amazing Stories,
dating back to the 1930s. I haunted used book stores—especially Stephen's
Fantasy Book Service—for back-issues to fill the gaps in my collections.
There would come a time when the content
of my reading would deeply affect my life; for now though, the books I read so
avidly on the messengers' bench were books I entered like a movie theatre,
leaving my own daily life outside. Perhaps that was why I was able to
concentrate so well.
The cachet
of the publishing houses did not exist only in my head, and was not just the
glorification of familiar names like Random House (which published Modern
Library) or Scribner's (for Hemingway) or Doubleday (which had recently begun
publishing science fiction in hard cover). What mattered as much to me was the
physical impression these houses made, their decor and their location in the
city. I took great pleasure, for instance, in visiting Macmillan Company in its
own building—now occupied by Forbes
Magazine—on lower Fifth Avenue or visiting McGraw Hill in its green
skyscraper on West 42nd Street, even though I had small or no idea
what authors they published. Simon and Schuster and Pocket Books occupied either
adjacent floors or opposite ends of the same floor in the RCA Building. I loved
riding the sleek elevators, admired the sepia murals in the lobby.
Doubleday and Harcourt Brace, both in
rather ordinary office buildings on Madison Avenue, impressed me with their
modernity, open floor plans with indirect lighting and mazes of cubicles that
seemed like a foretaste of the future. Knopf, by contrast, in a staid office
building at Madison and 52nd, had thick carpets and wood paneling,
seemed to deny the reality Doubleday and Harcourt Brace were so eagerly
embracing. Best of all, most romantic and rewarding, were the offices of Harper
Bros., not yet Harper & Row, in a fine 19th century brownstone
off Madison Avenue in Murray Hill; and the offices of Random House in the north
wing of the Italian Renaissance style Villard Houses on Madison between 50th
and 51st Streets; most of the Villard Houses, now a shell behind
which a giant hotel looms, were then occupied by the Roman Catholic Diocese of
New York and I was captivated by the juxtaposition. Just to enter Random House
though, to climb the narrow winding flight of stairs to an upper floor, was to
leave my daily self behind as effectively as though I had opened a book and
vanished between its covers.
The freedom I had to move through the
city streets when I was out on a "run" or to read on the bench while
I was waiting to be sent out, the kindness and good humor of the dispatchers,
the absence of close or nagging supervision, were not sufficient to insulate me
from a feeling of humiliation at being a messenger. The feeling grew much more
intense once the school year ended and I began to work full time. Part of the
problem was that the other full-time messengers were—how do I make myself sound
like less of a snob than I probably was?—enough to inspire disdain in the most
open‑hearted receptionist. They were uneducated, scruffy, surly, sometimes
elderly, sometimes alcoholic, sometimes partly deranged. Like myself, they were
minimum wage workers, a thin cut above daily laborers. And in their eyes, and
the eyes of the public who saw me moving through the streets with my armloads
of proofs, and above all in the eyes of those young and beautifully groomed,
inevitably haughty receptionists, I was one of them. My friend Herman was away
working as a counselor in the Poconos. I missed him a lot.
It was only during the summer that I
began to cheat my employers. Not that I ever dumped proofs in a trash basket
the way I had political pamphlets I had been paid to distribute years before. We
messengers were supposed to take busses for any distance over eight or ten
blocks. I walked everything up to twenty blocks or more and filed a petty cash
slip for my five-cent fare. Very occasionally, I was required to deliver a
block of actual set type rather than a proof. The first time was a joke. The
dispatcher gestured casually at a small paper‑wrapped parcel on top of the
counter and told me to make it my first stop. I slid my fingers under the
string that tied the parcel, and then stood there transfixed, as though my hand
had been nailed to the counter, while the dispatcher and a few of the nearby
printers laughed. The parcel must have weighed thirty or forty pounds. I began
by taking cabs as I was supposed to, but by summer I was either walking or
taking busses with the lead weight, billing petty cash for imaginary cab fare.
I don't believe that the job itself,
whatever occasional humiliation I may have felt, prompted my dishonesty. I did
not feel exploited or taken advantage of in any way. Outside factors had
weight. I had been accepted at the University of Chicago, but I had not won a
scholarship and my family could not afford to send me there without one. I
don't know whether I was angrier at myself for failing the scholarship exam or
at my father, who had always managed to send himself to Florida for a couple of
months every winter, with plenty of money in his pockets for the race tracks
and the card games, for not having the money to send me to Chicago. Writing sixty-five
years later, I am struck by how angry at my father I must have been. He had all
the answers, had read all the books, was chock full of innate ability, but he
hadn't been able to pay for what I cared about most, which was getting away
from him.
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